from Sunday Herald, 09 May 2010
Rising costs have prompted new fears for one of the central planks of the Scottish government’s strategy for cutting climate pollution.
Scottish ministers want to keep burning coal in power stations by developing technology to capture and store the carbon dioxide they belch out. But new evidence from Norway suggests that this could cost nearly three times more than expected.
This comes on top of recent expert reports casting doubt on the feasibility of carbon carbon and storage (CCS) - the great green hope of the energy industry. The technology is, however, strongly defended by its backers in Scotland.
One of Norway’s flagship CCS projects is run by the state-owned gas company, Gassco. But it has revealed that the estimated costs have rocketed from £0.4 billion in 2007 to £1.2 billion now.
“The CCS costs are big and higher than we initially thought,” said Sigve Apeland from Gassco. The company is trying to capture, transport and store 1.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from the Naturkraft gas-fired power plant at Kårstø.
Gassco told the environment company, ENDS, that the escalating costs were mostly due to the difficulties of actually capturing the carbon. It is a process that absorbs a lot of energy, which makes it expensive.
“This is only one example, but these kind of cost increases could kill off the prospect of having full-scale carbon capture working any time soon,” said Dr Richard Dixon, the director of WWF Scotland.
There is a pioneering scheme aimed at developing CCS at the Longannet coal-fired power station in Fife, run by Scottish Power. Both the Conservative and Labour parties have promised four CCS plants, but neither have said when.
Dr Dixon said: “The new government needs to make very clear their timescale for moving to the next phase at Longannet and more generally developing CCS in the UK.”
A report from two US universities in Texas has argued that the difficulties in storing carbon deep underground have been hugely underestimated. It concluded that burial was “a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of carbon dioxide emissions.”
An earlier report from Harvard University in the US also argued that the costs of CCS could be over £100 a tonne. That’s about twice the cost forecast by the Scottish government.
“The doubts about carbon capture and storage are growing week by week, and it increasingly looks like an impractical and unaffordable technology,” said the Green MSP Patrick Harvie.
“It is wildly irresponsible to use the mere hope of a viable CCS option as an excuse for new coal plants, as both Labour and SNP Governments have been doing. I understand the optimism people had for this technology, but we must now act on the basis that it may end up as no more than a pipedream.”
The Scottish government has backed plans to build a new coal-fired power station at Hunterston in North Ayrshire. But it is insisting that the plant starts up with a fifth of its carbon being captured and stored.
Stuart Haszeldine, the ScottishPower CCS professor at the University of Edinburgh, pointed out that costs in Norway were always high. As CCS projects were developed and expanded, they would benefit from the economics of scale, he argued.
“It’s entirely to be expected that the cost of capture will be extremely high for the first 10 or so projects in Europe,” he said. “That is why these need support by national governments, as commercial companies cannot afford such expensive experiments.”
According to Haszeldine, the experience gained from experimental plants would reduce the cost of subsequent plants by up to 50%. “With any new technology it is normal that the best estimates made initially turn out to be optimistic,” he said.
Haszeldine also criticised the Texas study for using "bizarre assumptions" to come to the wrong conclusions. "Their argument is, literally, full of holes," he said.
For Scottish Power, which is owned by the Spanish energy company, Iberdrola, the point of its prototype CCS plant at Longannet was to find ways of reducing costs. “That is key to the future of CCS, being able to capture CO2 effectively and efficiently without it being cost prohibitive to ourselves or consumers,” said a company spokesman.
“We have made significant progress so far,” he added. “And we are confident that we will cross more barriers, achieve more breakthroughs and deliver even better results.”
Any idea what is the £/MWh(e) cost of CCS at the Gassco plant?
Posted by: Shehnaz Jackson | 09 May 2010 at 05:42 PM